François Ozon works quickly. He has made five movies in the past four years, the latest of which, 8 Women, arrives in Edinburgh on Friday. By the time it is released across the UK in November, he will have finished its follow-up, Swimming Pool.

Ozon recently visited London to shoot key scenes for Swimming Pool, and everybody involved in the production - his crew, his producer, even his lead actress, Charlotte Rampling - described him as a natural; the type of director who calmly walks onto the set and knows exactly what he wants, and gets it without any fuss, on schedule, if not ahead of it. In critical circles, by contrast, the 34-year-old director has developed a reputation of being a devilish prodigy who'll do anything for controversy. Homosexuality, incest, fetishism and other forms of transgression are the only connecting strands in his wildly fluctuating film career.

For 8 Women, the novelty is spectacular commercial success. The film has been a huge hit in France, thanks primarily to a cast of top French female talent, led by Catherine Deneuve, Isabelle Huppert, Emmanuelle Béart, and Fanny Ardant. Combined with a country house murder-mystery plot revolving around the death of the unseen patriarch, the film is something like a Gallic Gosford Park - the Musical.

Ozon's previous output hardly indicated his film-making would take this direction. He made his mark in 1997 with an hour-long short film See the Sea, which drew comparisons to Polanski and Hitchcock. His 1998 feature debut, Sitcom, was like an overexcited catalogue of his favourite perversions, in the style of Almodovar or John Waters. Then came Criminal Lovers, a "true crime fairy tale" featuring murder, bondage and male and female rape, followed by Water Drops on Burning Rocks, a polysexual domestic tale based on an unproduced Fassbinder play. Ozon identified himself with Water Drops' 18-year-old protagonist, who is seduced by an older man, but since then he has deflected attention from his own sexuality. Last year he made a radical departure into mature, pensive, heterosexual film-making with Under the Sand, again starring Charlotte Rampling.

Ozon may have had relatively little with which to lure his actors, but he was successful all the same. "I made a list of my dream cast, and to my surprise, they all agreed," says Ozon, a tanned, well-groomed, relaxed man who looks more like a model for Ralph Lauren than French cinema's enfant terrible. "Maybe it was because of Under the Sand. The film was a success in France and Charlotte [Rampling] has made something of a comeback. I think these actresses wanted me to do the same for them." Ozon admits to having been uncharacteristically nervous at the prospect of directing these screen legends, but if there was any on-set friction, he is too diplomatic to reveal it. "Actually they didn't know each other very well, so they were curious to work with each other. But when they were together the ego stopped. Sometimes it's more difficult to make a film with two stars than with eight."

It also helped to have so many beauty assistants on the set, he adds. 8 Women goes to great lengths to make its stars look fabulous. The film's aesthetic is an homage to the haute couture, Technicolor splendour of 1950s Hollywood. The costumes quote classic films like Douglas Sirk's Imitation of Life and Vincent Minelli's The Band Wagon, and everything from hairstyle to facial lighting is highly considered. The actors also each get to perform a song-and-dance number (with varying degrees of success, it must be said). Added to which, the cast had the chance to play with their familiar screen personas, from Huppert subverting her role in last year's The Piano Teacher to a lesbian encounter between Deneuve and Ardant.

The original intention, Ozon explains, was to remake George Cukor's women-only melodrama, The Women, but he discovered that the rights to that are owned by Julia Roberts and Meg Ryan. Instead he settled on a play from the 1960s by Robert Thomas. "I didn't really like the play - it's very old-fashioned - but I realised with this story I could put in all what I wanted to say about women, and make a film with different levels. The first level is very easy to understand for the audience, like an Agatha Christie book. In another way, it's a film about the family, about women together, and about cinema, actresses - French and American. In a way it makes a game out of all these different levels. I changed many relationships between the women and tried to put some modern feelings into it, because the play was too polite, very bourgeois."

Femininst critics have complained that Ozon's heroines are all defined by the man of the house, and that they are all portrayed as bitchy, money-grabbing harlots beneath their glamorous veneers. "People have said the film is misogynist," he acknowledges, "but if it was the same thing with men, nobody would say, 'He doesn't like men'. My wish was first to give the appearance of beauty, then to show that the women are different from their image, and in the end to love them because of their difference, because they are more complex."

French audiences certainly had no problem with Ozon's vision of femininity, especially when it involved Deneuve and Ardant rolling around together on the carpet. The film is currently the year's fifth highest performer at the French box office, and is also doing well in Germany - Gerhard Schroder has even invited Ozon and the cast over. Surprisingly, the film has also been popular with children. "This makes me very happy," says Ozon, "as the film was like me releasing my inner child. I must admit, I used to play with dolls' houses when I was a boy."

This success comes at a time when French cinema has been congratulating itself for fighting off Hollywood. Last year French films took more than 40% of the home market for the first time in two decades. Ozon's film was one of the reasons why; Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Amélie was another, and people have been quick to lump them together, as colourful, quirky distillations of a "Frenchness" on which the country is losing its grip. "It's funny, because the most successful films are the most French, but for me Amelie is a cliche of France. It's a tourist vision of France - that's why the film was a big success in America. I don't know if my film is a cliché too; my film is more about playing with the image of French glamour and fashion."

Ozon takes no patriotic pride in 8 Women's success, perhaps because he feels that the French film industry has never really had faith in him until now. "When I was shooting the film, everybody in Paris said I would never finish it. They thought it was impossible to make a film with these eight stars."

· 8 Women screens at Edinburgh on Friday (UGC), and Sunday (Filmhouse 1). Tickets: 0131-623 8030. The film is released on November 29.